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Re: quoted-printable

1992-02-12 13:46:18
Let's say it is in a European language such as German.  Now, the vast
majority of the characters in the message -- maybe even on the order of 99%,
though I don't really know that much about the frequency table of letter
usage in German -- will be characters without the high order bit turned on,
i.e. legitimate ASCII characters.  A few stray characters, however, will be
things with umlauts, and so on.

I don't know the frequency for German, but for Swedish the number of charac-
ters with the high bit set is about 2% in random text.  I checked this some
time ago, with the contents of the newsgroup "swnet.politik", which I regard
as random in more than one way...

With quoted printable, this message can be sent in such a way that it is
essentially readable in its "raw" form, on any ASCII terminal.  If we encoded
it in base64, it becomes gobbledygook in the absence of decoding software. 
This is the primary rationale (there are others) for the existence of
quoted-printable, and I think it's a darned good one....  -- Nathaniel

In complete agreement,

--Johnny

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